Making Israel Great Again?
The apparent abandonment of Ukraine and Adam Boehler's negotiations with Hamas have raised serious doubts about Donald Trump's commitment to Israel.
Washingtonâs grand strategy on the Palestinian issue remains unclear, as does its understanding of the players involved, especially Hamas, which has ruled the Gaza Strip since 2007. This is causing considerable anxiety in Jerusalem.
These questions have gained pertinence and urgency following a series of interviews that Donald Trumpâs new âhostage envoy,â Adam Boehler, gave to American and Israeli media platforms. Over recent weeks, Boehler has directly negotiated a possible new hostageâprisoner exchange deal with Hamasâat Trumpâs behest, but apparently behind Israelâs back. âWe are not an agent of Israel. We have specific [American] interests at play,â he stated, apparently in reference to the American/Israeli dual citizens who were among those taken hostage by Hamas in its 7 October 2023 assault on southern Israel and who remain in captivityâwhether dead or aliveâin tunnels in the Gaza Strip. Officials in Israel are troubled by the thought that Washington may be seeking the separate release of American hostages alone, rather than negotiating a deal that encompasses all those held in Hamas captivity.
But Israelâs irritation about the interviews was more general than this. Boehler has opined of Hamas that, âThey donât have horns growing out of their head. Theyâre actually guys like us. Theyâre pretty nice guys.â After this unsurprisingly ruffled feathers in Jerusalem, Washington immediately issued a correction: âThey are definitely bad guys.â But Boehler then predicted that Hamas will soon disarm and âfade awayâ from the Gaza Stripâan idea that is completely divorced from reality. On the contrary, over the past months, Hamas appears to have recovered militarily and is clearly in control of Gazaâs civilian population. In his interviews, Boehler even got the hostage/prisoner terminology backwards: repeatedly calling the Palestinians held in Israelâs prisonsâmost of whom are convicted terrorists, including mass murderersââhostages,â while designating the Israelis languishing in Gazaâs tunnels, most of whom are civilians, âprisoners.â
The US government, along with the European community, has long defined Hamas as a terrorist organisation and Trump has repeatedly said that it needs to be eradicated. Is this still Washingtonâs position? Or is Hamas now an acceptable negotiating partner and a legitimate partner in the future governance of Gaza? And if so, could Hamas also be seen as a legitimate party that might eventually govern the West Bank, a region that, in the past, Trump has hinted should come under Israeli rule? Washingtonâs policy on the Palestinian issue may be in real flux, and Israelâs right-wing leaders are deeply concerned.
Boehlerâs missteps did not result in his immediate dismissal; he remains on the White House staff. Yet Hamas is still dedicated to Israelâs destructionâit is a deeply antisemitic organisation and its spokesmen have promised to repeat the kind of assault we saw on 7 October 2023 many times in the future. Many observers have cast doubt on the strength of Trumpâs opposition to antisemitism over the years. In recent days, the Administration partially defunded Columbia University, which, since 7 October 2023, has been the scene of major, antisemitism-inflected riots and building takeovers, and the government has also charged or detained some of the more prominent foreign-born progressives who have backed Hamas and called for Israelâs destruction, âfrom the River to the Sea.â But most thinking Israelis remain doubtful about Trumpâs real convictionsâif, indeed, he has anyâabout Jews, and by extension about Israel.
Francis Fukuyama
Publicly, Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters continue to paint Trump as a staunch, irreproachable supporter of Israel. They point to the fact that, during his first term as president, he transferred the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, as Israel had long demanded, and remind people that he helped facilitate the Abraham Accords of the early 2020s, which normalised the Jewish Stateâs relations with Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and even Sudan. And in recent weeks, he revoked his predecessor Joe Bidenâs suspension of certain weapons shipments to Israel, including 2,000-pound (907 kg) aerial bombs and 155 mm artillery shells.
But serious doubts remain as to Trumpâs commitment to the âspecial relationshipâ between Washington and Jerusalem, especially in view of his apparent abandonment of Ukraine and his very public efforts to distance the United States from its traditional commitments to European security.
The AmericanâIsraeli special relationship predates even the establishment of Israel itself in May 1948. Six months earlier, defying his own State and Defence departments and the CIA, President Harry Truman ordered America to support the establishment of a Jewish State at the UN General Assembly, as part of a push for a two-state solution to the ZionistâArab conflict. And in May 1948, Truman recognised Israel within minutes of its declaration of statehood. But Truman was not all in. During the 1948 War, he embargoed all arms shipments to Israel, while the country was fighting for its life against Arab aggressors, leaving it reliant on Stalin-endorsed Czech arms shipments to win the war. The following American Administration, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, not only effectively embargoed arms sales to Israel but supported the Soviet demand that Israel withdraw from Egyptâs Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip following the SinaiâSuez war of 1956.
The special relationshipâbased on shared values like support for democracyâhesitantly re-emerged under President John F. Kennedy, who began supplying the IDF with specific kinds of defensive weaponry, such as Hawk anti-aircraft missiles, and matured under President Lyndon Johnson, when Washington sold Israel advanced jet aircraftâSkyhawks and, later, Phantoms. Israelâs sterling military performance in the 1967 Six Day War gave Washington another important incentive to invest in the special relationshipâIsrael was now a strategic and intelligence asset in the Middle East, a region chockful of peoples and regimes unfriendly to America.
Curiously, it was President Richard Nixon who consolidated the special relationshipâeven though American Jews did not vote for him and critics alleged that he was at least mildly antisemitic, though he did employ the Jewish refugee from Germany Henry Kissinger as his national security advisor and later secretary of state. During the 1973 October War, Nixon sent massive arms shipments to Israel, as well as providing major financial aid, which helped persuade Israel to gradually withdraw from parts of the Sinai Peninsula again, thus paving the way for the IsraelâEgypt peace treaty of 1979.
Since then, Israel has received ever more sophisticated weaponry from the US, assuring it a qualitative technological edge over any combination of Arab aggressorsâwhich has helped deter Arab attacks on Israelâas well as billions of dollars annually, which help prop up the IDF and the Israeli economy. In the last infusion of cash and weaponry in 2016, the US and Israel signed a ten-year strategic pact assuring the Jewish State of some four billion dollars annually, most of it spent in the US on American weaponry. Meanwhile, Israel has been officially designated âa non-NATO ally.â
Over the decades, many Israelis hoped that the US would enter into a formal mutual defence pact with Israel, but most Washington officials and some Israelis have resisted this. In Washington, the officials argued that the United States must maintain a modicum of âbalanceâ between Israel and the Arabs in order to retain power and prestige in the Middle East; while the Israeli naysayers argued that such a pact would constrain Israelâs military freedom of action.
But with the capricious Trump in power, the special relationship itself may be up in the air. Trump blows hot and cold; he blusters and folds; where he really standsâexcept in his desire to make deals and moneyânobody knows. His unpredictability was highlighted by his recent proposal to solve the Gaza problem by transferring most or all of the Stripâs 2.2 million inhabitants to Egypt, Jordan, and other places. After Egypt, Jordan and the Arab League rejected the idea, which they describe as heralding a second Nakba (a reference to the disaster that befell the Palestinians in 1948), Trump backed off, saying that he only envisaged voluntary emigration from the Strip and possibly only by small numbers of people.
But in fact Trump, as Netanyahu has more or less acknowledged, had put his finger on a crucial reality: As long as millions of fast-multiplying, impoverished, unproductive, and radically Islamised masses populate the Strip, it will breed terrorism and war in a continuous cycle of bloodletting, blocking every avenue to a possible IsraeliâPalestinian peace. Since 1948, the Strip has been a cesspool of violence sustained by international charity.
Despite all Trumpâs posturing on Gaza, no one really knows how he will respond to the next Middle Eastern crisis. That crisis could be triggered by a breakdown in current IsraeliâAmericanâPalestinian negotiations over a further stage in the hostageâprisoner exchange, which may result in a renewed Israeli effort to uproot and extirpate Hamas. It is unclear whether Trump would support a renewal of Israelâs war in Gaza. In addition, a crisis may erupt as a result of new Iranian advances in the Islamic Republicâs nuclear weapons project. Trump has said that Iran must negotiate a halt to its nuclear project or face the consequencesâmeaning an aerial assault on the part of the US, Israel, or both, against Iranâs nuclear installations. But what if Iran agrees to negotiateâbut then drags the talks out endlessly, while clandestinely progressing toward the bomb? Will Trump, who has long criticised American boots on-the-ground involvement in wars in the Middle East, draw back from military confrontation and even forcibly restrain Israel from attacking Iranâi.e. by threatening Israel with political isolation or an arms embargo or by interfering with its deployment of the American-made and partially American-controlled F-35 stealth fighter-bomber squadrons, if it even threatens to go on the offensive?
Joseph Nichol
And even in the absence of an immediate, concrete crisis, can Israel rely on an isolationist American president for its basic security needs in the long-term, when such confusion as that displayed by Adam Boehler seems to characterise official American thinking on the Middle East? What does Trump really want and what will he do, or not do, to achieve his ends? If all he really cares about is the United States, can Israel rely on him when it comes to the crunch?
In recent weeks, Netanyahu has been testing Trumpâs purpose and resolve on such issues as beginning a new hostageâprisoner exchange and formally ending the war in Gazaâsomething Netanyahu is reluctant to sign on toâand on what kind of political/military arrangement will replace Hamasâs rule in Gaza on âthe day afterâ the war ends. American officials, as well as Arab leaders such as Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi have spoken in vague terms about Hamasâs Palestinian rival, the Ramallah-based Palestine National Authority, taking over the governorship of the Strip, something Netanyahu has ruled out because it might eventually lead to Palestinian statehood, which he sees as an existential threat to Israel.
Trumpâs stance on the Palestinian National Authority and on Gazaâs future more generally remains opaque, and all this ambiguity in Washington is not only generating uncertainty in Jerusalem but preventing a resolution of the crisis that began with the Hamas assault on Israel on 7 October 2023.
